


Dust and Dreams

by icarus_chained



Category: Original Work
Genre: Brothers, Darkness, Dreams, Foolishness, Future, Gen, Goblins, Hope, Mythology - Freeform, Original Fiction, Outer Space, Science Fiction, Stars, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-07
Updated: 2014-01-07
Packaged: 2018-01-07 22:31:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,753
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1125160
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icarus_chained/pseuds/icarus_chained
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A trio of original pieces on the themes of dust, dreams and goblins. Vaguely science-fiction.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dust and Dreams

**The Spinners in the Stars**

There are goblins out there. Out amidst the void, in the eddies of the angel-tides between stars, their gnarled limbs curled in the dark hollows of the universe. Crooked things, faceless in the darkness, giggling soundlessly at their own malevolence. In the long watches of eternity, in those hollow spaces where the light is thin and sound is vanished and mortals huddle in their curved shells of metal and mineral against the emptiness, _there_ are there goblins.

And the goblins are evil things. They are the spinners in the stars, the spiders in the web of ages, the pluckers and pullers of threads that shape all worlds between them. They will take from you. They might pluck from you a moment, a year, a lifetime. They might steal across stellar tides and take from you a tithe, all unbidden. While you drift, shipwrecked and strained between their whirlpools, they might reach across the emptiness and wrap long, spindled fingers about your craft, peel it gently open as a mortal might peel an egg and peer curiously and gleefully into its confines while you bleed air and force and life out into the void. They are the takers of things, and the stealers of things, and they hold all the blank and willful malice of ancient children.

But they are the makers of things, too. Ever evil, always evil, but they are not without purpose, no. They are the spinners in the stars. They are the weavers, the music-makers, the harpists who play sweet and terrible songs across the warp and weft of universes. They are the singers in the darkness and the warpers of mortal fate. They are the gods, and the demons, and the remorseless forces of empty universes, and they are _useful_. These goblins, these faceless things. Oh, but oh, they are useful.

They might take from you a tithe. But if asked, if pled with, if their whim allows it, they might create for you a gift, either. Great are the gifts of gods, and greater the gifts of goblins, this has ever been true. They might grant madness, or inspiration. They might steal hope, or fear. They might tear open, or rebuild, bone by bone, flesh by flesh, shell by shell, until none may stand in the path of what they create. They might break you, or they might spare you, or they might _make_ you, as never you were made before. They might, by whim or by chance or by pity, for one frail moment, be moved to offer you a gift.

Watch for them. Watch for goblins in the spaces between stars. Watch for the gnarled limbs, and the emptiness where ought to be a face. Watch for the cloak of void that moves, suddenly, in the eddies of vast tides, and grants to you a glimpse of the spindled thing beneath it. Watch for long fingers weaving warp and weft of emptiness, the flash of woven void that is not, no matter how it seems, a natural thing at all. In the hollows and the silence, in the darkness and void, be watchful, be ever watchful, for that abyss that will be looked into, and look _back_.

The universe is dark and deep, moved by the tides of stars and angels, drifting along the skein of infinity. The universe is sweet, and terrible, and full of soundless singing. And in it, in the hollows of it, watching you as you sail past in huddled shells, there are the goblins.

Watching you, ever and always, are the spinners in the stars.

 

**Sleeping, Seeping**

"All this," the man said softly. Kneeling in the ashes of a scorched earth. "All this, brother, just to rob me of my dreams?"

"Your dreams made you weak," the other answered. Cold and pitiless, his blank gaze falling over a shattered landscape without so much as a flicker of remorse. "There were none among us who did not see it, brother. They had slipped inside you. Poisoned you with foreign thoughts. Made you long for ..." A twist, emotion. Contempt. "For _gentle_ things. For all their soft poisons." A lift of one lip. "You must see that. You must know what they did to you."

The kneeling figure shook his head, face twisted in a grieving mask. "You had no right," he whispered, soft and desperate. "You had _no right._ This was my _dream_ , brother! They gave it to me, and it was mine. This was ... this was my _dream._ "

His companion stared down at him. One fist knotting, a hard, cold clench of pain, as he looked down at the crumpled form beside him and what remained of the brother he had once known. On his face, too, there was something close to grief.

"Your dreams were poison," he said, very softly, as he turned to leave. "Sooner or later, they would have killed you. They were poisonous dreams, my brother."

"... Yes," the dreamer whispered, to the fading echo of his footsteps, his hands digging softly among the ashes. "Yes, brother. But they were _mine._ "

It is often said, you see, that the antidote to all poisons ... is a poison itself.

 

**Dome of Heaven:**

The wind is high today, moving across the vault of heaven. It will not stir its fingers through our dust, not today. It will not touch the earth, will not feather childish fingers through our hair, will not sting bright tears from our eyes. Today, the wind is far away, and will not deign to join our play.

Ah well. That is the wind's prerogative, and well deserved, perhaps. To ignore our little games and chase a higher course, to fly far and wide and touch the sky above some other child, smile down upon some other earth. That is its right, after all.

For now, we will be content to watch it move the sky. To watch it sheet the clouds high and thin, to paint the heavens a rippled, radiant silver. To watch the grey, cumulus leviathans drift serenely beneath them, buoyed by wind's fingers and laughing breath. To see the sun, high and vast, two hours beyond his zenith, be cradled in the silver net to hang, liquid and white-gold, against Heaven's Wheel. To watch It turn, at the wind's behest, and know the movements of things greater and more laughing than ourselves.

There was a man, you know. Once upon a time. A man who looked up at that silver vault, at the arc and wheel of Heaven above his head, and despaired. Despaired that his fingers would never touch what the wind touched, that his breath would never move what the wind moved, that his eyes would never see what the wind saw. A man who desired, beyond all else, to know those vast and laughing movements as his own. A man who desired to have the Wheel of Heaven beneath his hands, and move it to his will.

What could he do, this man? What could any man do, with such a desire? The Heavens were not his, nor ever would be, not to that man as he was then. Not to us as we are now. These things are not ours to move, and touch us only as they will. We are children beneath the Wheel, and It laughs at us yet. Not unkindly. Distantly, perhaps. Its games are not our games.

But this man, he would not surrender. His desire was so strong, his wild passion for the sky, for that great vault. He would not give in, though Heaven would never be his. So instead, in place of the vault he could not touch ... this man built a different vault. A smaller arc, a Heaven made by man, guided by his hands. A monument, to a sky he would never own. A memorial, for a desire that moved him, nonetheless, to try.

A dome, it was. On the mountain above the plains, where no other man could reach, could touch what was not theirs. A dome of the palest, whitest stones, balanced upon six massive pillars, the height of thirty men apiece. Hung between them, the thinnest, finest carved screens, glowing pale in the sun, allowing the wind its play between their nets. 

And above ... above, the Dome itself. Full the height of fifty men above the ground at its zenith, the vault was his dream of Heaven. Made of the pale, near-translucent stone of the sea-plains to the south, carved upon its outer face so that the light of Heaven flowed in arcs and billows through it to those who stood beneath. Feathered across in sweeps of filigree silver, the dust of earth upon the Heavens. And at it's cusp, the pillar of light, the window to the Upper Vault. To the sky. The bridge to Heaven, through which one day he dreamed to pass. 

The window he never saw shaped. This man, mortal and desperate, never saw the finish of his dream. He never saw his Dome completed, never gazed upon the monument to his desire that thousands after him took for their own. This man, this dreamer, who had lost the Wheel of Heaven, never held his own.

That monument still stands, you know. The Dome of Heaven, it is called. The Madman's Arch. Pale and crumbling, now, as the dust stirs softly at its feet. The man who moved it is long since gone, leaving only the stillness of stone in his wake. The memory of the Heaven he built, beneath the endless arc of the one he could not touch.

One day, perhaps, a man will do what he could not. One day, man might brush the clouds across a sky with delicate fingers in the name of art and creation, and it will be perfect. One day, we will gild silver across the heavens and delight in the radiance that shines beneath our fingertips. One day, we will do that. But ... until then, what shall we, like him, comfort ourselves in doing? 

We shall build flawed monuments to foolishness in stone and silver, and listen to the wind laugh softly at what they show us of ourselves. We shall build our domes, and know the movements of things greater and more laughing than ourselves.

And perhaps, in that distant future where stars sing to our touch, we shall look again at crumbled stone, and think: "Once, we were foolish children, reaching after adult dreams. 

And we were beautiful then."


End file.
